Subject of Question: prestige language

Question:
Why are some forms of language seen as more prestigious than others?
I am looking into not only accent and dialect but also areas such as Black English, language related to gender and also multilingualism.

Hello.   I am writing you on behalf of Ask a Linguistics Tutor in response to your question.   I have a very simple answer to your question. Various forms of language, such as accents, dialects, gender varieties, and even multilingualism, are seen as more prestigious than others completely because of the people who speak them.

It honestly has nothing to do with any aspect of the language itself. In other words, the social status of the speakers of any given language or dialect is what designates it as the “prestigious” one, and this often gets entangled in education, whereby educated people supposedly speak a purer," more "correct," form of the language as "grammar" books tell them everything they need to know.   Yeah, I’m bitter. It’s ok.

This idea of people in power deciding the "best" form of the language applies to all of the areas of your question.   For dialects, there is often one that is chosen by the people in power who live in the affluent, metropolitan regions in the country, such as the Tokyo dialect of Japanese, the Parisian dialect of French, the Seoul dialect of Korean, and the Midwestern dialect of American English.

The movie My Fair Lady is a good example of the media further promoting dialect discrimination in England. This also leads to gender-based dialect discrimination, whereby the "inferior" gender in society will often face prejudice for the way they speak. p>In Madagascar, for example, the typical gender roles are reversed, and the women use "aggressive" speech, while men use more passive forms of verbal interactions.   Despite this contrast of gender roles, the "preferred" speech in this society is nonetheless that of the men because timidness is valued over aggressiveness.

Multilingualism, as well, receives well-merited attention in terms of language discrimination. In societies where multilingualism is not the norm and the only multilinguals are those of a different ethnicity, the other languages are discriminated against mainly in cases where the speakers of those languages are already stigmatized.

So, for instance, Spanish and English bilinguals in America may view Spanish in a negative light, as would intolerant non-bilinguals, due to the oppression of the Hispanics in American society. This also applies to AAE (African American English) speakers, as well as monolingual speakers of Southern dialects of American English, because these people are oppressed and seen as "inferior" in comparison to the bourgeoisie Midwesterners (who believe they have "no accent").

I hope this rhetoric helps you out!

Sincerely,
Andrew Pollak
University of Michigan
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